REVIEW ESSAY Opening Up to the Ocean: The Changing Shape of Maritime East Asia Adam Clulow, Monash University Xing Hang. Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia: The Zheng Family and the Shaping of the Modern World, c. 1620–1720. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 344 pp. $100 (cloth). Gang Zhao. The Qing Opening to the Ocean: Chinese Maritime Policies, 1684–1757. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. 280 pp. $56 (cloth). The past decade has seen a surge of impressive new work in early modern East Asian maritime history. The trail first blazed by pioneering scholars like Jack Wills, Leonard Blussé, and Iwao Seiichi has been followed in recent years by that of a new wave of historians, including Tonio Andrade, Patrizia Carioti, Wei-chung Cheng, and others. These scholars have brilliantly combined European, especially Dutch East India Company, materials with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean sources to produce a composite picture of a rapidly changing maritime world (Andrade 2005, 2011; Carioti 1996; Cheng 2013). Xing Hang’s excellent new book, Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia: The Zheng Family and the Shaping of the Modern World, c. 1620–1720, is not only the latest but also one of the most impressive entries into this field. At its heart, Hang’s monograph is a superbly contextualized set of three overlapping biographies: of Zheng Zhilong (1604–1661); his son Zheng Chenggong, or Koxinga (1624–1662); and his grandson Zheng Jing (1642– 1681). Together, these three generations of the Zheng family created a formidable maritime organization that sprawled across East and Southeast Asia before establishing a territorial state with a distinct maritime orientation on the west coast of Taiwan. Hang uses these overlapping biographies to make three arguments. First, the Zheng organization succeeded in adapting traditional Chinese institutions and orthodoxies in a way that enabled them to harness merchants and mercantile interests. Second, they were able to Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review E-Journal No. 20 (September 2016) • (http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-20) Clulow 103 convert these modified structures into a successful state-building program that allowed them to establish a territorial state on Taiwan and “informal economic hegemony over much of maritime East Asia” (15). Third, and even as they moved to craft hybrid structures with a clear maritime orientation, the Zheng continued to rely on what Hang calls “continental modes of legitimacy” (16). The result is that the Zheng were remarkable innovators who nonetheless remained trapped within a constraining framework that tied them to Ming restoration even as they charted a new path that took them further and further away from past models of Chinese statehood. All of this meant that Koxinga and Zheng Jing in particular were able to come close to, but never make, the leap to a “fully legitimate maritime Chinese kingdom” on Taiwan (3). After an initial introductory chapter, chapters 2, 3, and 4 focus on Zhilong and his son, Koxinga. Both are well-known figures and, while there is much that is new here, the book’s primary contribution lies in its later chapters, which focus on the neglected grandson, Zheng Jing. Any discussion of Koxinga always returns to the same questions regarding motivation. Was he truly loyal to the Ming, willing to sacrifice his own interests in order to achieve Ming restoration, or was it all just a show? Hang shows a Koxinga torn between “political loyalty” to the Ming and “filial piety to his father.” He argues that these conflicting priorities allowed him a significant degree of freedom but that the struggle between the two roles “plagued conscience for the rest of his life” (77). I agree with the former, but find (on my reading at least) little evidence of the latter. Rather, Koxinga switched easily and opportunistically between identities. Political loyalty and filial piety were not opposing poles, but components of an expansive repertoire that changed according to circumstance. Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia really comes into its own when it turns to Zheng Jing, long dismissed as the unworthy successor to his charismatic father. Emerging from a wayward youth that included an array of dalliances that led him dangerously close to an early death, Zheng Jing was the true creator of the territorial state on Taiwan, and he established an effective bureaucratic structure in the territory under his control. Far from diminishing (as past scholarship has suggested) after the collapse of Dutch rule, revenues surged under his leadership. Sifting through the figures, Hang shows that sugar exports grew, deerskin sales remained largely unchanged, and overall revenues went up by 30 percent. The result was that the Zheng organization, as is shown again and again in this study, was able to beat the formidable Dutch East India Company, long feted for its successes in this period, at its own game. Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review E-Journal No. 20 (September 2016) • (http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-20) Clulow 104 Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia follows Andrade’s groundbreaking first book, How Taiwan Became Chinese, which examined the Dutch East India Company’s move onto the island. Andrade showed us a hybrid Dutch colonial state built on a basis of Chinese labor via a process he labels “co-colonization”; Hang describes its successor, a hybrid Chinese territorial state that made expert use of Dutch technologies of rule. These two books in conjunction should be required reading for any class on empire. The great struggle for Zheng Jing was to articulate an identity that enabled coexistence with the Qing regime across the Taiwan Strait. Here, he displayed a brilliant capacity to improvise. Refusing Qing demands to publicly submit by shaving his head, Zheng Jing suggested instead that Taiwan should be treated be as a foreign country. Taiwan would, he explained, simply “follow the example of Korea, not shaving the hair but calling ourselves your ministers and paying tribute” (185). It was a remarkable formulation. If accepted, Taiwan would be transformed overnight from a renegade territory at war with the Qing to a loyal tributary, and Zheng Jing would gain Qing protection without having to accept Manchu customs or political intervention. Not surprisingly, Qing officials refused, explaining that “Korea has always been a foreign country (waiguo), but Zheng Jing is a man of the Middle Kingdom (Zhongguo zhi ren)” (187). By 1673, more than a decade after the end of Dutch rule, Zheng power seemed more secure than ever, and the island was well on its way to becoming an autonomous maritime kingdom. But rather than continuing on this path, Zheng Jing opted to intervene spectacularly in the mainland after the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories broke out. Hang argues, first, that the decision to intervene was entirely political and was not prompted, as some scholars have suggested, by a poor economic situation. The military struggle initially went well and then swiftly deteriorated, but, as late as 1677–1678, Zheng Jing was offered a way out when Qing officials actually approved the ambitious Korean solution put forward years earlier. Zheng Jing refused. Why he opted not to take the obvious exit ramp and why the Zheng persisted in doomed continental adventures are the key questions at the heart of Hang’s study. The answer, which I find very persuasive, is that the Zheng, for all of their multiple innovations, remained boxed in by an “internalization of their professed loyalty to the Ming” (249). This meant that, rather than devoting all of their energies to the creation of a maritime- oriented state, they persisted again and again in returning to the impossible dream of Ming restoration. Here, then, we see the great paradox of the Zheng: their success and continued Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review E-Journal No. 20 (September 2016) • (http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-20) Clulow 105 survival was based on their skillful deployment of Ming credentials, but it was precisely the refusal to abandon these attachments that ultimately doomed the Zheng enterprise on Taiwan. The most compelling works on maritime East Asia reveal the impossibility of following conventional area studies boundaries by drawing a line between Japan and China in this period, and this is especially clear in Hang’s study. The Chinese coast, Taiwan, Japan, and even the Philippines, Cambodia, and parts of Southeast Asia were all part of the same interconnected maritime zone. Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia goes further than this, and it makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Tokugawa trade and foreign relations. Hang demonstrates, first, the remarkable intimacy of the Zheng relationship with Japan. This was most clearly evident during Koxinga’s lifetime, when close connections were forged with all of the key actors in Nagasaki politics. This meant that Zheng merchants could draw on the protection of Tokugawa officials who intervened to protect shipping against Dutch East India Company attacks. Even more strikingly, the Zheng treated Japan as a military labor pool from which to draw soldiers. Japan specialists will be fascinated to read of a “special samurai division known as ‘iron men’” in Zheng service (105). Second, Hang reworks our understanding of the status of Chinese merchants in Tokugawa Japan. It has long been standard in Tokugawa history to talk of a hierarchy of relations running from sovereign-to-sovereign relations with Korea to commercial relations with the Dutch, who retained the right to visit the court, to Chinese merchants with no diplomatic status. In my own work, I have argued that the Dutch in Japan did end up in this position, but that they got there by following a roller coaster ride that saw them drop in status from full diplomatic partners, emissaries of a fictive “King of Holland,” to vassals of the Tokugawa state (Clulow 2014).